Terese, what you have to say is interesting,
but you really should find a way to avoid
such monstrosities as his/her, s/he, her/him-
self etc. Of all the achievements of feminism,
from the sublime to the ridiculous, these awful
contortions of the MOTHER tongue may be the
most ridiculous---certainly, the dumbest and
least useful. And this wrongheadedness has
now made ubiquitous the illiterate stupidity
of using a plural pronoun for "everybody" or
"a person". Since you're writing about a
women, you can reasonably use the feminine
pronoun all the way through, even where you're
using it generally. The argument about "he,
him, his" etc. is really silly. When it's
used generally, it has the masculine form but
it is not masculine. It's like the Latin
word "homo" which can be translated as "man"
but is often used to mean any human being of
whatever sex. If a Roman wanted to specify
a male person, he (or she, as the case may be)
would use "vir" (from which comes our word
"virile"). If it really bothers you to write
something like "a poet should use his language
with tender loving care," you could avoid it
by writing "poets should use their language &c"
But it's pointless to avoid. I know men who
never fail to use those barbarous PC locutions
and who never fail to treat women as shit.
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